Your time spent doing bike stuff other than riding

When I don't have time to actually ride my bike I do enjoy:

> Planning where to ride
> Planning on how to get to the above "where"
> Cleaning my bike
> Fitting nice new stuff to my bike
> Adjusting and making better the bits on my bike
> Reading about bikes
> Watching bike videos

This. My situation is very very similar. Added to by having moved south and not being familiar with the area. Sadly I think it's starting to affect me. I know I need to break the cycle but it never seems to happen.

I know I need to break the cycle but it never seems to happen.

Saves time on maintenance I guess 😉

I'm the same as the OP... but probably need to add:

- defending to my OH the amount of time I spend on bike-related things.

All of the above for me.

Even in the times I just don’t have any mojo for riding, which happens quite a lot as I get older unfortunately, I still like most other things around bikes.

It probably depends on the type of person you are and what excites you in general. For me, I’m a hands on engineering type so messing with and researching bikes is something I enjoy - irrespective of the riding desire.

I’d say my hobby is all things cycling, which then needs no justification as hobbies can and do become irrelevant money and time pits to those on the outside 🤪

I've had a cracking weekend of cycling:

Friday - 3 hours having a bike fit
Saturday- 8 hours marshalling a circuit race
Sunday - 5 hours riding.

Plus prepping bike for the ride, browsing on line, looking at YouTube clips and GCN each highlights....

Reading nonsense on here

That's about it

It changes with kids obv. I now spend my time (Outside work, where messing with bikes is kind of the job)

Tidying up after kids
Watching kids play rugby
Taking kids cycling
Taking kids to things not cycling
More tidying up after kids
Fixing stuff the kids broke around the house
Fixing stuff time broke around the (very old) house
Etc.

I do most of my riding during the week (Perk of the job I guess) or at 6am in the morning if on a weekend.

I spend more time riding than doing the other stuff. Next on my to do list today is:
Go for a bike ride 🙂

I love the whole process of building, modifying and generally messing with bikes. I can't leave them alone, all my bikes are Trigger's broom jobs, every part get s changed. researching and hunting for parts at the cheapest possible price, selling the old bits, sometimes not selling them and inadvertently buying a frame and ending up with another bike, all of it. Love it, spend far too much time on it.

Depends on the bike.

I quite enjoy that first 6 months of ownership where everything just works for ride after ride. My resolution the last few times things have gone wrong has been to give each of my bikes at least one a major 'preventative' service at least once a year. It's not cheap throwing ~£300 at drive chain, tyres, brake pads, etc all at once but in the long run:

1) All that would need doing soon-ish anyway
2) It's easier all at once (e.g. if I'm going to index the gears to the new cassette anyway, may as well replace the shifter cable now rather than next month, if I'm doing the shifter cables I may as well do the bar tape on the road bike, if I'm doing the bar tape I should do the brake cables too, etc).
3) I kid myself it actually saves me money as if the bike feels good and everything is working I'm going to spend time actually riding it, not sat at home thinking about how rubbish it feels and how I'd be happier if I spent some money on upgrades.
4) In the long run it saves time and missed rides. No dragging the bike out the garage on the first dry Saturday in weeks only to find it's got a puncture and now you've missed the start time.

* maintaining my bike
[s]* reading bike websites[/s]
* nerding and experimenting with optimal bike setup
* choosing bike things to buy (occasionally)
* STW forum
[s]* watching videos of other people riding[/s]
* planning routes

Other than STW I don't really look at other bike websites.

I do a wee bit of bike set-up but it's more to do with changing wheels/tyres/forks for whatever route I'm planning.

I might look at some bikepacking videos but that's more for the scenery and route ideas. Watching "racing" of any type I find terminally boring. Same as circus tricks 🙂

I do a lot of route planning but a lot of that is for other folk, including for publication in a magazine (not this one).

I certainly don't mind, and actively enjoy, working on my own bikes. It's usually quicker, easier and cheaper than dealing with local bike shops, plus I have trust in my own skills 🙂

At the moment I spend far more time reading about bike related stuff than riding, due to the crap weather.

I'd add trailbuilding, coaching, bike club meetings (committee/coaches meetings) and trailbuilding planning/meetings to the list...

I'm 100% sure that I spend a completely disproportionate amount of time doing bike related, but not actually riding, bike things. But that's half the fun.

I get just as much enjoyment from the tech and MTB community, media etc as I do from riding - it's just a different type of enjoyment.

I probably spend am average of 1 hour fettling to 10 hours riding. I spend way too much time on here.

Spending seems to go in phases. I spent virtually nothing on the bike/cycling last year. A pair of bars and some consumables for the bike. Some Gore bib 3/4 for me.

This last month or two I've bought a shed load of new clothes, spares and a new drivetrain.

I like fiddling with bikes (and boats) though. I tend to stock up on bigger bike jobs for a dry windless weekend day. All the bikes out, tools out and spend a half or whole day pottering.

I like understanding how and making things work or work better for its own sake so unless the job is going badly I get a real sense of satisfaction and/or enjoyment from fixing stuff. Do hate the disposable culture though

As well as the above......

I really enjoy buying and setting up my 10 old son's bike/s as well as watching him race. I even enjoy the drives there and back where we can chat and listen to music.

Fitting new bar tape is a nice job to do.

Fitting a Thunder Burt to a Stans Alpha rim not so much. I snapped two Park tyre levers.

Yeah, if I'm being honest pretty much all my idle time (I.e. outside work and time with the fam) is spent on something to do with bikes (or at a stretch, the outdoors generally). Whether that be riding them, buying them, fixing them, adding expensive trinkets to them, planning adventures, or just thinking about riding them.

Love all of it TBH

It's called faffage - The preserve of the middle aged man! 😂

People actually ride their bikes? How do you find time to do that when there are so many other bike related activities to do??!

In addition to all those above I spend a lot of time:
Checking the wind forecast to work out whether I'm jumping or trail riding this weekend.
Photographing bike parts to go onto ebay.
Explaining to the wife that buying new parts and selling the old now completely unusable parts results in a net profit.
Trying to get any of Peaty's tubeless stuff to actually work.

Recently I've spent as much time walking on rides as I have riding (see my commuting thread...)

I don't do as much internet rummaging as I used to, think I got to the bottom of that barrel, and there's not much upgrade shopping left for me to do, as I've pretty much completed that too. (plus the last project, as well as it turned out, almost broke my love of bikes altogether), so once the gravel commuter is finished, imma have a bit of time off from my reputation.

So my riding to other stuff ratio is definitely heading away from the other stuff now, and if I can get somewhere as good at riding as speccing & building bikes and injury free, I'll be happy with that. Want to get to more events too.

Never did that much maintenance or fettling/faffing anyway. #supportyourlbs

Maintenance and tinkering.  I get upset when every bike is running perfectly as I have nothing more to tinker with.  Every bike has to run completely silently bar chain and tyre  noise.  NO brake drag allowed,  Nobody but me puts a spanner to my bikes

Plotting routes and looking at maps

Currently trying to work out a way of putting a bar bag on my fat bike and keeping it stable and failing so that is a fair amount of head scratching and looking at it

I don't read MTB websites, magazines or watch videos.

I do very little looking at upgrades - every bike is where I want it to be

I have nothing more to tinker with.

This simply can't be true. Those drop bars over there on bike 1 could potentially work really well on that other bike over there and, you know it might be worth trying a mullet set up on that road bike... The devil bike shed makes work random acts of customisation for idle hands.

I still think that bikes and riding are actually quite good for ROI of the time spent doing bike stuff compared to actual riding. Yes, you may spend an hour here swearing about a stuck bolt or a couple of hours there trying to get a bead to seat when you have switched tyres (like last night and it still hasn’t), but it is pretty good compared to some sports.

Skydiving… Each 60 seconds of freefall needs prep before for between 15 and 60 minutes depending on jump and then about between 20 minutes and an hour afterwards (depending on the jump). Then weather. Then tunnel. Then travel.

Shit, when I was doing serious long range target shooting, the prep time was measured in the many, many hours and days and the competitions were done in half a day and rested sometimes in a single 1.6s flight time.